Clacton-on-Sea, England — At the end of Clacton Pier, where the salty North Sea breeze tangles with the sickly stench of the nearby amusement hall, a row of amateur fishermen gaze way off past the horizon, towards Europe.
The lights and the noise here start early every day. Seagulls dart down from the sky; arcade games blare over each other; Radiohead, the Nineties alternative band, wails gloomily from a tinny speaker, until an employee notices, and puts on a dance anthem instead.
The funfair is always in town, but the people have stopped coming. “We seem to be a bit forgotten down here in Clacton,” Danny Botterell, a small business owner, his aging seaside home, which can no longer rely on visitors from London. He looks towards an empty seafront. “It’s a bit like God’s waiting room.”
But Clacton is the front line of Britain’s migration debate. And there is still one man who can draw a crowd: Nigel Farage, the rabble-rousing architect of Brexit and figurehead of the country’s populist right, who told hundreds on the pier last week that he was running to be their member of parliament in next month’s general election.
Farage has pushed the boundaries of Britain’s conversation on migration for a decade, and more recently sought to do the same in the United States, campaigning regularly alongside former President Donald Trump. He has returned to hammer the ruling Conservatives from the right once more, as though little has changed since the tempestuous EU referendum campaign eight years ago that resulted in the UK’s departure from the bloc.
“We know Nigel likes to get his point across, and shout,” Botterell says. “That’s a massive positive.” Like many here, he expects Farage to “speak the truth.”
Farage is the favorite to win Clacton and become an MP at the eight attempt. His Reform party is meanwhile swallowing up the support of dissatisfied ex-Conservatives across Britain, dragging the ruling party into what opinion polls suggest will be an ignominious battle for second place behind runaway leader Labour.
One pollster this week had Reform – an upstart group formed by Farage in 2018, then known as the Brexit Party – overtaking the Conservatives. Others have them close behind.
Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system makes it difficult for fringe groups like Reform to win more than a handful of seats in Westminster. But if the predicted surge holds, it could push Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s party to a once-in-a-lifetime defeat, and hand Farage an outsized role in British politics nonetheless.
That is not an outcome asylum experts or rights groups welcome. They say Farage’s presence in British life has already warped the country’s understanding of migration, and hardened attitudes towards the tens of thousands caught in a backlog of unresolved asylum claims.
“He can talk about migration in a way that makes it sound like he’s really telling the truth – telling it like it is, and playing into people’s deepest fears and prejudices,” Zoe Gardner, a migration policy specialist .
“Farage knows he needs to stay one step ahead of where even the right wing of the Tories are,” she adds, likening his rhetoric to Trump’s on illegal migration across the southern US border.
“They’ll always want more,” she says. “Their career is based on pushing things ever, ever, ever further.”
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